The idea is to encourage you seek out these charming cinemas, to soak up the atmosphere and enjoy good movies, all in one visit. If you do visit, any venues on our pages, please say, Hi, from Cinematourista. Also, if you pick up any theatre news we can pass on, please let us know. This site is a volunteer effort and so it's hard to keep up

We were initially concentrating on NSW which has more small independent cinemas than any other state. Now, we think we have every boutique theatre in NSW, the other states as well, and are beginning to list charming singe screens and twins overseas. If you know of a cinema you think is woth us listing, please email us. With Digital projection now making running a cinema so much easier, we expect new cinemas to continually appear. Every country town needs and deserves a picture palace!

From the site you should be able to find out quite a lot about the nature of the cinema you'd like to visit. Does it run full time or just occasionally? With some theatres, like the Amusu, a group can arrange a special event screening with prior warning. You'll also be able to find out whether a cinema is mainly art house, mainstream, or both.

Taken together, there are many hundreds of surviving small indep. cinemas around the world . We have an exciting list in preparation with cinemas in New Zealand, Canada, Great Britain and the US.

But it's a huge amount of work as you can imagine, and so we are pround to have identifed all those in NSW, over 20 theatres at the present moment, and to be starting with those. They are a national treasure!

You'll find a map on the site (cinema tours) which will suggest two tours you conld take right now, one in Southern NSW and the other above Sydney, right up to the Queensland border. Each has around 10 cinemas on the circuit.

Criteria for including a cinema on the site are as follows. That it be indendent, be regional, that it be charming, intimate, and be hosted in some warm and friendly way. The cinemas we love have owner managers or volunteers very much around. Most that we've identified so far also have some heritage value.

We are avoiding city cinemas for the moment because the old and interesting ones either tend to be very grand, or to be split into many small acreens . Right now, we don't include cinemas with more than two screens though the Saraton at Grafton with three, is on our list.

We will also give space to cinemas which are being fixed up, as is the case with the Regal at Newcastle, the Atheneum at Junee, and more distantly, the Liberty at Yass.

If any close we will of course report that. We will have a watch list for cinemas in danger, hoping that our site might help them survive Happily, the great wave of single screens closing seems to have ended though we did lose the Sawtell on Dec. 31st 2012. Mount Vic Flicks quickly re opening, after closing in July 2013, is very encouraging.

We believe of course that audiences, the older audiecne, especially, wants to go to a cinema wtih charm and atmophere, that they want to magic to be not just in the movie, but in the venue as well.

There will be no cost to a cinema for inclusion.

Down the track, cinematourista.com will recoup its costs with ads that are somehow sensibly linked. We can imagine inviting motels in the towns with listed cinemas, to give discounts to cinematouristas.

We also might provide products for those cinemas who want them. These could include postcards based on artworks of each member cinema and specially printed postage stamps featuring the cinema.

Most importantly, we forsee some sort of passport for the Cinema tourista to bring on a visit with page for each cinema, and which could be stamped by the cinema. Thus a visitor could come to a cinema, buy a card, affix an appropriate stamp, mail it to friends, and have their passport stamped with the day and date of the visit. The movie seen might also be recorded

The passport, sold on line with a page for each participating cinema, will be called, The Silver Screen Saver, stressing the idea that this entire activity is aimed at helping small screens to survive and thrive. This will be the message of our press release once we are fully up and running.

Another role of the website down the track will be to provide info for people interested in setting up a small cinema in their town, a very do-able initiative with digital projectors now established and their prices coming down. We have several very knowledgeable people ready to help with that, to give free advice . To think about that, this UK site is a very good place to start.